Tuesday, August 1, 2017

PRIVACY: Use Snapchat to track down your friends. Literally.

The controversial Snap
Map app enables Snapchat users to track their friends. This is the latest in a
series of monitoring tools to be built on social media platforms.

A new
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich study assesses the benefits and
risks associated with their use.

The image messaging
service Snapchat is particularly popular among young adolescents, and the
recent release of its latest feature -- Snap Map -- provoked widespread concern
among parents, and protests from child protection agencies.

Snap Map enables users
to monitor their friends' movements, and determine -- in real time -- exactly
where their posts are coming from (down to the address). Many social media
users also expressed their indignation, referring to the app as 'stalking
software'.

"However, Snap
Map is just one of a range of apps that allows social network users to be
monitored without their knowledge and with pin-point accuracy," says
Professor Neil Thurman of the Institute for Communications Studies and Media
Research at LMU.

"Indeed some of
these apps far exceed Snap Map in their surveillance capabilities, and are able
to track individuals over time and across multiple social networks."

In his latest study,
which has been published in Digital Journalism, Thurman lists a
range of such apps -- including Echosec, Dataminr, Picodash, and SAM.

While Snapchat's Snap
Map is aimed at the public, many of the other social media monitoring apps are
aimed at professional users, including the security forces, journalists, and
marketeers.

Help with verification

Thurman analysed how
journalists reacted to these new tools for locating and filtering content on
social networks, and monitoring the activities and movements of its authors.

It turns out that
these apps are particularly useful in verification, enabling journalists to
judge whether witness accounts were actually posted from the supposed scene of the
action.

"These apps have
been welcomed by some journalists who see them as an 'early warning
system'" says Thurman, but they also have consequences for users' personal
privacy, he argues. In the course of his study, he interviewed journalists who
were given an opportunity to experiment with some of these apps professionally.
One said that being able to track the locations of individual social media
users felt "slightly morally wrong and stalker-esque."

Fear of negative publicity

However, reservations
like this are apparently not universal.

"One of the apps
my report describes, Geofeedia, was used by hundreds of law enforcement
agencies, promoted as giving the police the power to "monitor" -- via
social media -- trade union members, protesters, and activist groups, who the
company described as being an "overt threat."

The Geofeedia
controversy led to its demise, with social networks refusing to persist in
supplying the app with a pipeline of posts for fear of further negative
publicity.

According to an article
in the business magazine Forbes, cited by Thurman, the sheer number of apps
that have been built on their platforms makes it impossible for the leading
social media networks to prevent this form of social surveillance.

"As we've seen
with the launch of Snap Map, social media surveillance is not going to go
away," he warns.

"Although we
might now know how to go 'ghost' on Snapchat, how many of us know that our
other social media posts could be betraying our whereabouts to the thousands of
organisations around the world using social media monitoring apps most have
never heard of?"

Thought for the day

“Charlottesville is a great place that’s been very badly hurt over the last couple of days. I own, actually, one of the largest wineries in the United States. It is in Charlottesville.”

Donald Trump, responding to a question whether he would go to Charlottesville to offer support and comfort as so many Presidents have done in the past.

Quick fact check: Donald Trump does not own the winery; his idiot son Eric does under the name Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC. And at 36,000 cases annual production, the winery is not even the largest winery in Virginia, never mind the United States.

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